You gain brouzouf...

Is there enough gear/experience to just skip the open world stuff? It wasn't clear to me when playing if I would hit a wall and needed to grind on the open world to progress.

Yeah your understanding about the towers is correct. I don't think it's inherently bad, I've even enjoyed it in some of the AC games, but in rebirth it just feels like a bad chore list. Some of the combat challenges can be interesting but the ones with the summon stones (I forget the name, but they reduce the power of summon fights and do other things) and scanning the life springs are just terrible imo.

This is a pretty bad take and I feel like you must have not really played tribes very much. Comparing tribes to CS? Really? You think the popularity is because of the team sizes?

The fact that they are only implementing 16v16 seems like a warning flag to me. I wouldn't be surprised if this ends up as a mediocre experience with a few tribes mechanics just largely trying to cash in on name recognition.

That applies to the software itself, sure, but only if you bring your own infrastructure. Large scale FOSS infrastructure services are going to be the exception not the norm.

Nah I'd disagree. Infinite growth motive doesn't necessarily apply to private companies. To suggest there's unbridled greed present in every company is just a falsehood.

If you're not paying for a service, then you're the product. I never understood the expectation that people should just provide you email and storage for free, because?

I would agree with this, I use Nvidia cards for professional work on Linux and I've never had a problem. Yeah there's some upfront work configuring the drivers, but I've never had it take more than an hour to setup.

This drives me crazy every time I see it so I'm glad to see others recognizing this. Yes game production has gone up, but the market has massively increased. Your costs are fixed; doesn't matter if you sell 10,000 copies or 10,000,000. More people are gaming than ever so when I see all these attempts to squeeze more money from consumers to address rising costs I have no sympathy for the publisher.

YouTube already does that, though? In fact your premium sub helps creators much more than a non-premium viewer does. Of course the multiplier proposition would be new/different.

Not trying to shill for YouTube but that's one of the main reasons I have a subscription is to support creators I like.

Basic features like turning a bulb on with a set brightness or color (if you're lucky, you can turn on with a set brightness). No support for scenes (due to matter spec) which can lead to issues sending commands to light groups. And if you want to actually update bulbs good luck because it's buggy as hell.

I wouldn't say they're great; they're adequate. There's a lot of issues with the bulb firmware that still needs ironing out both with stability and feature set.